This is the 2010 IRI first place trophy. This picture shows the glass soccer ball without the name plate on the base (that will be added Thursday at IRI).
1/8" thick stained glass, waterjet cut from opalescent glass
Teams getting second place will get a similar ball, with frosted white panels replacing the gold panels.
This ball was created by AndyMark, Inc., with Mark Koors as the designer. Waterjet Cutting of Indiana provided all of the glass cutting, as a sponsorship effort to support IRI.
Only the winning teams and runner-up teams will be getting these trophies. All individual awards will be medallions.
Same. Just using a bit of combinatorial geometry, my guess is that what you’ll find is a webbing that is essentially the dual graph1 of the of soccer ball. Since a soccer ball (or Buckyball mathematically speaking) is a polyhedron of pentagonal and hexagonal faces with vertices of degree 3, the resulting dual will be a polyhedron with only triangular faces, with vertices of degree 5 and 6. These vertices look to be the insertion points of the screws.
All that being said, the webbing might be constructed differently than the perfect dual graph to allow for easier assembly and construction. Alas, what is perfect and elegant in the mathematical world, rarely works in the real world.
In graph theory, a dual graph of a given graph](Planar graph - Wikipedia) G is a graph which has a vertex for each plane region of G, and an edge for each edge in G joining two neighboring regions. This theory can be extending into 3D polyhedra geometry.
In layman’s terms: Pretend the bolt heads are dots. Connect the dots. Some dots have 5 connections, some have 6. It makes a pretty cool shape made of triangles.
After ignoring much of the silliness of what was posted above, we just took a picture of the ball without the blue glass pieces.
The inside structure is made from 2 polycarbonate hemispheres, each 1/16" thick.
Andy B.
(edit… on second thought, I could post something similar to Karthik’s convoluted solution and said that we used some 7-axis CNC welding process to do this. But, I didn’t. )
Sorry for injecting some interesting math (well, at least interesting to me) in to the discussion. In the future I’ll restrict my posts to drivel like “OMG. That’s sooooo cool!”
Anyways, here’s a picture I found on the web that illustrates what I was talking about with the dual. (Found on a combinatorial geometry course website at Merrimack College)
I thought it was great, Karthik. It’s about time some of our younger members and some of our newer mentors had this opportunity to read some of your thoughts/thinking/posts.
And… I followed some of it so I know that people who understand/grasp math concepts much better than I do would appreciate it with a greater and deeper understanding.
This year’s trophies have a special feature: the bottoms stay on.
Seriously, these are inherently fragile, since they are made of glass. So, it is possible for them to break. We are packing these up today, and each one will have it’s own box and packing material so teams can have a bit of help being careful with them.
The anodized base plates just came in, and they look outstanding. Also, the medallions look great. I will post pics on the AM facebook page soon.
)
